Sunday, July 04, 2010

You probably know, even if you're American, the above information. Some nice surprises in there, of course, and a real surprise for me at least about how heavily European the final four turned out to be. I'm looking forward to some good soccer. You should never look ahead in these things, of course, but being a faculty member in a "German Dept" where the Netherlandic Studies part of the department has long since been large and important enough that it's a true embarrassment that the department isn't AT LEAST called "German and Dutch" or "German and Netherlandic", one possible scenario for the final obviously gets and holds my attention: What if it's a German-Dutch final, or even third place match? Talk about a loaded situation, historically and otherwise.

But consider this tidbit. One of the big Dutch soccer chants is:

wie niet springt is een mof

That is, 'whoever doesn't jump is a mof.' Sounds a little like Wisconsin's big football chant/song/dance 'Jump around'. OK, but what's a mof? Well, Dutch has a long string of very negative words for, guess who, the Germans. This is one of them. This isn't cutesy negative, but negative negative. For the scholarly lit on these terms, check out: